A Tale of Two Stagnations

A Tale of Two Stagnations: The term “secular stagnation,” coined by economists in the 1930s and recently popularized by Larry Summers, has become a catch-all description for long-term economic pessimism. But it’s gotten confused with a very different idea — the technological stagnation hypothesis, proposed by economist Robert Gordon (and by Bloomberg View’s Tyler Cowen). These are two very different ideas. Both would lead to slow growth in the long term, but they imply different causes and different remedies. …